Links: PC-BSD 8.1 and Lightspark 0.4.2 Released, Other Free Software/Open Source News
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2010-07-22 18:55:05 UTC
- Modified: 2010-07-22 19:00:10 UTC
Summary: Today's news about digital freedom and openness
Morevna is an open source anime project made using open source tools like Synfig, Blender, GIMP and Krita. Unlike Project London Movie, Morevna is not only created using free and open source tools, but Morevna anime will also be released and distributed as free content. This project definitely deserves a lot of appreciation.
Whether you just want to balance your checkbook or you need to track the finances of a large global corporation, you can find open source software to do the job. For our list of open source financial tools, we cast a wide net and included applications related to enterprise resource management, point-of-sale and even employee time tracking. Not to mention traditional accounting and financial management tools.
One trend worth noting -- a huge number of the open source tools on this list, particularly the business applications, are now available on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis. For businesses, this model seems to make sense, as it gives them access to support and reduces the need for in-house staff to deploy and monitor applications. It also enables a more mobile workforce and keeps costs low. And of course, this model is also great for open source vendors as it gives them another way to monetize their open source projects.
Without further ado, here are fifty open source applications that might be able to replace the financial software you currently use for your home or business.
If you haven’t run into a situation where you need to rename multiple files in one go, you haven’t been using a computer for long. When the next time comes, turn to KRename. Its simple graphical interface makes renaming files easy for average users, and it offers a powerful template language for advanced users with more complex renaming tasks. Although it was written for the KDE desktop, KRename works under other Linux platforms and even on Windows.
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Web Browsers
Last week we showed Opera 10.60 to be the world's fastest Web browser. That was in the Windows world. But where do Chrome, Firefox, and Opera stand in Linux? Today we find out. Adding the Win 7 results, we'll also learn which OS has the speediest browser.
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Mozilla
Firefox 3.6.7 and Firefox 3.5.11 are now available as free downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux from http://firefox.com. As always, we recommend that users keep up to date with the latest stability and support versions of Firefox, and encourage all our users to upgrade to the very latest version, Firefox 3.6.7.
The latest Firefox 4.0 nightly build adds a new download ("Save link as") / upload dialog - in Linux that is, as I didn't try Firefox 4.0 Windows or Mac builds. This may have been added earlier but only now I've noticed it.
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SaaS
There’s a real explosion of cloud platforms and management tools, it seems you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one these days. In the commercial proprietary solutions space you have – CA’s 3Terra AppLogic, Enomaly, Nimbula, RightScale. In open source there are Eucalyptus, Cloud.com, Open Nebula and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. There are a bunch more that I failed to mention. It makes you wonder do we really need another one? How much different can they be?Rackspace Champion's Open Source Cloud I am not sure but the newest one appears to be rather significant.
NASA is dropping Eucalyptus from its Nebula infrastructure cloud not only because its engineers believe the open source platform can't achieve the sort of scale they require, but also because it isn't entirely open source.
NASA chief technology officer Chris Kemp tells The Reg that as his engineers attempted to contribute additional Eucalyptus code to improve its ability to scale, they were unable to do so because some of the platform's code is open and some isn't. Their attempted contributions conflicted with code that was only available in a partially closed version of platform maintained by Eucalyptus Systems Inc., the commercial outfit run by the project's founders.
In some ways Facebook is still a LAMP site (kind of), but it has had to change and extend its operation to incorporate a lot of other elements and services, and modify the approach to existing ones.
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BSD
The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.1 (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, and KDE 4.4.5
One of the features that sets FreeBSD apart from other open source opeating systems, is its governance structure. FreeBSD is not owned by a company, though many companies use it and contribute code back, but yet is run as if it were a company, with the Core Team taking decisions and steering the Project.
The FreeBSD Foundation funds various projects each year and there are several interesting projects in progress:
* DAHDI (formerly known as Zaptel) FreeBSD driver port--this project will make it possible to use FreeBSD as a base system for software PBX solutions
* resource containers and a simple per-jail resource limits mechanism
* userland dtrace
* BSNMP improvements
* jail-based virtualization
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Project Releases
The Lightspark project has released version 0.4.2 of its free, open source Flash player. According to Lightspark develoepr Alessandro Pignotti, the alternative Flash Player implementation is "designed from the ground up to be efficient on current and (hope fully) future hardware".
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Government
Operating as the Open Information Security Foundation, and working with a number of government-related private companies, a team headed by Mark Jonkman of Emerging Threats and Victor Julien of the Vuurmuur firewall project are offering an intrusion detection and prevention engine with multi-threading automatic protocol detection for a wide variety of protocols.
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Openness/Sharing
It's an ambitious effort to preserve, restore and promote the re-use of traditional skills and inventions from all over the world.
We risk stifling the development of new tools, both commercial and academic, and new knowledge under the weight of a legal regime that was designed to cope with the printing press. At the same time a simple statement that this kind of analysis is fair dealing will provide certainty without damaging the interests of copyright holders or complicating copyright law. These new uses will ultimately bring more traffic, and perhaps more customers, to the primary documents. By taking the simple and easy step of making automated analysis an allowable fair dealing exception everyone wins.
After the election and looking to the post-Becta future, Open Source Schools has been making new plans to ensure that the community is able to respond to the changing educational landscape where the benefits offered by open source are becoming ever more important.
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Open Data
Opening up food and agricultural data requires an information architecture and infrastructure that does not currently exist. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization is a leader in providing easily accessible, highly usable, and surprisingly current data, but right now it is far ahead of the pack in terms of transparency in reporting.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- IBM is "Taking the PIP" (Piss), People 'Retire' 'Voluntarily' to "Focus on Family"
- IBM has a billion bucks for 'the butcher', but not a million dollars for critical projects and initiatives in Free software
- It Should be Uncontroversial to Say That Social Control Media is a Weapon
- Democracy is not compatible with the likes of Kapo-Berg and MElon controlling public discourse of billions
- Debian: Plagiarism OK, Just be "Responsible" About It
- The result isn't the worst, but it's not good either
- Don't Let Them Kill Activism
- Are the oligarchs shutting the lid on activism and whistleblowers?
- Michael Catanzaro's Latest Blog Post Affirms Rumours of Red Hat Changes and RAs/PIPs at IBM
- reading between the lines, IBM is "spitting out" Red Hat staff
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- Links 29/08/2026: Microsoft GitHub Outage (Again), "Displaying Ads Directly on Your Monitor", and "Election Deniers Could Soon Control Elections"
- Links for the day
- Misuse of Bots (Now Sold as "Agents", "Hey Hi", "Automation", and "Efficiency")
- They even try to rebrand robotics as "hey hi" and try to sell slop as "work"
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 165 Out of 200: Two Years Since My Wife and I Sued
- In early September 2024 we hit back
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, August 28, 2026
- IRC logs for Friday, August 28, 2026
- Gemini Links 29/08/2026: Death Notice, Systems Biology, and Gopher
- Links for the day
- Links 28/08/2026: Chatbot Pushers Admit They're Used Heavily for Social Engineering Scams, Strong Backlash Against "Smart Glasses" (CCTV on Legs)
- Links for the day
- If Linux Was Written in Rust, 80% or More of Linux Developers Would Not Understand It (Same If It's Composed by LLM Slop)
- The licence (GPL) is not enough when there are ways to bypass it
- Gemini Links 28/08/2026: Absurd Tomodachi Summer, Screen Piggery, and Jugulans 1.0.3 Released
- Links for the day
- Links 28/08/2026: "UK Power Grid Has a Phantom Data Center Problem" and "Growth at All Costs is Cancer"
- Links for the day
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 164 Out of 200: Patent Troll SLAPPs, Defamation Trolls, and Stranglers From America
- You start to wonder if the core issue is insecurity
- Rumours of More PIPs and Layoffs at Confluent Just Months After IBM Bought It
- It is meanwhile apparent IBM will have mass layoffs next week (September)
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, August 27, 2026
- IRC logs for Thursday, August 27, 2026
- After Many Waves of PIPs (Silent Layoffs) IBM Makes Non-Silent Layoffs, Effective Next Week (September)
- What we heard is turning out to be true
- Gemini Links 27/08/2026: Oklahoma, Tennessee, Haiku OS, Digital Resistance, and Staying Offline
- Links for the day
- Links 27/08/2026: Facebook to Pay Up to $17.1 Billion to Cover Up Known Harms, Nepal Landslide Kills Many
- Links for the day
- The Register MS Has Just Published Paid Spam That Says "AI" 19 Times
- 1.5 hours ago
- Mainstream Media is Paid to Link "AI" Criticism/Boosting to Jeffrey Epstein Enablers, in Effect Showing How Corrupt This Media Became
- Many readers will have noticed what was a paid-for PR campaign of a global scale
- RSS is King: Why Having Subscribers or Followers in Sites You Neither Own Nor Control is Loss of Autonomy and Search is Mostly Slop (Plagiarising Sites, Not Linking to Them)
- Because digital connections in third parties aren't assets; they endow another party with tremendous power over people (e.g. MElon getting to decide who can and cannot reach people or what messages to "dim down")
- Claims of Tens of Thousands of 'Silent Layoffs' at IBM (and Red Hat)
- Looking at recent activity in thelayoff.com, about 80% of the comments and posts are about PIPs
- Links 27/08/2026: "Flock’s CEO Is Lying to Cops" and Microsoft's GitHub Actions Breaks Down Again (Too Many Layoffs, Loss of Knowledge)
- Links for the day
- Clownflare Sees GNU/Linux and ChromeOS at Over 13% in Bahamas
- Narrowing down to desktops and laptops, and judging by Web requests that go through Clownflare, many people there use GNU/Linux or Google's 'bastardised' version of it (with spyware preloaded)
- Richard Stallman Complains That Linux Gives a Bad Name to GNU and Asks for Feedback on What's Wrong with Systemd (and Wayland)
- Maybe some people want to send him a detailed, polite explanation
- GNU/Linux Does Not Need Social Control Media to Succeed
- When it comes to Social Control Media, Richard Stallman was right
- Increasing Focus on Patent Injustices
- We'll soon cover the EPO a lot more
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 163 Out of 200: Attack on Computer Science and on Computer Security (or Associating Back Doors and Kill Switches With "Security")
- Nowadays there are many who pretend to be security professionals
- There's No "Next XBox"
- Nothing comes ahead except layoffs and price hikes
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, August 26, 2026
- IRC logs for Wednesday, August 26, 2026
- Gemini Links 27/08/2026: Conditioning, Lagrange 1.21, and Computer Games
- Links for the day